Today, Explained - Why body cameras don’t work

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

Body cameras were supposed to bring greater transparency to law enforcement. The case of Ronald Greene suggests police departments are still learning how to use, and even abuse, a new tool. Today’s show was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Hey, just a heads up. Today's episode features some strong language, some descriptions of violence, and extremely disturbing audio pulled from some police body cameras that we think is essential to fully understand the story. But please consider

this warning. So it's the night of May 10th, 2019, and Ronald Green is driving through northeast Louisiana near the city of Monroe, and he comes to a traffic stop. The officer tries to pull him over. We don't know exactly for what. Green doesn't stop. He tries to pull him over. We don't know exactly for what. Green doesn't stop. He keeps going. He accelerates and he ends up in a high-speed chase going north of 100 miles an hour

along these rural roads in part of northeast Louisiana, about 30 miles from the Arkansas border. And we know that that chase comes to an end on this quiet rural street and that after it, Green dies. That's sort of the initial picture. This is Jake Blyberg. He's a reporter with the Associated Press. And on the show today, he's going to help us understand

how having police wear body cameras doesn't always lead to greater accountability. At least, not without a fight. So what police tell Ronald Green's family in the immediate aftermath is that he died after hitting a tree at the end of a high-speed chase. And that's about as much detail as they have. And Ronald Green's mother, Mona Hardin, and the woman he's living with at the time, I think are immediately skeptical of that. They don't think that makes sense. They don't think that fits with the person they know. And, you know, they're just confused as to, you know, the injuries he has

relative to the very limited damage to the car he was driving and how he could have died. So they're just, they have a lot of questions one of the things that i think really sparks confusion is the rental car that green was driving that did hit a tree at the end of this chase is not very heavily damaged. It's got some pretty superficial body damage, the type of thing you might go to a body shop and spend a couple hundred dollars on without even bringing in insurance. And although he hit

the tree, the airbags didn't deploy. And I think that raised questions pretty immediately for the families. How could he have sustained fatal injuries if the airbags didn't even deploy? And, you know, none of the windows on the car were broken. And I think they just felt right off the bat that they weren't getting the full story. Time passes, and Green's family retains an attorney, and I think they begin to try to piece together what happened. There are interviews with the police officers who are, you know, investigating at the time, and members of his family are asking the police what happened, and they're just not getting very satisfying answers. When we first heard that Ronnie died because of a car accident, we immediately went

to Louisiana. We stayed there a total of nine days, and we had no cooperation, no communication with none of the police, no state troopers, anything. They just ran us in circles. We couldn't talk to no one and no one called us. And in 2020, Green's family files a lawsuit claiming that the Louisiana State Police brutalized him and left him beaten, bloodied and in cardiac arrest after this chase. They don't know a whole lot at this point, but they know that his injuries are inconsistent with simply a car crash. He has deep gashes in his head. His face is heavily bruised. And they file this lawsuit, and we don't really have the full picture here,

but, you know, his family has seen these photos of the car. They understand the damage to it was pretty limited. They're aware of what his injuries were. And I think they're suspicious at that point, and then they're saying in this wrongful death lawsuit, look, he was beaten by the police, and that's not the story we were told. It's part of his death. And in, you know, about September of 2020, my colleague sort of gets wind that there's a federal investigation into his death. It's horrific. I can't close my eyes and not see my son

and what they did to him. I find it hard to sleep. It's been almost a year and a half. It was hard before. It's even harder now. One of the open questions in the death of Ronald Greene is what we have on camera. The Louisiana State Police are one of the first statewide police agencies in the U.S. years ago

to equip all their officers with body cameras. Those cameras often activate automatically when the lights and sirens are on, as they would have been in a high-speed chase. And, you know, I think it's an immediate question for Green's family. Okay, this is what we're being told. What does the video show? It's unbelievable that this has gone this long. But I can see why it hasn't been revealed because it's another story here.

It's horrendous what happened to my son and the fact that this has been kept under wraps. And the fact that they were going to keep it under wraps because they thought that we would not do anything with this. There are detectives with the Louisiana State Police, investigators who routinely work cases when there's a death in custody. And those folks began work in this case. And I think it wasn't until one of them, a detective, I believe, named Albert Paxton, noticed one of the troopers who was at the site when Green died, a master trooper named Chris Hollingsworth. It wasn't until Paxton noticed that he turns off his body camera at some point that we really begin to have this question of,

okay, what footage is there of this? They commissioned an independent autopsy and believe police tased and beat Green to death and say troopers have refused multiple requests to release the officer's body cam video. So the next sort of piece that begins to fill in this puzzle comes in September of 2020 when the NAACP in Baton Rouge gets a hold of what turns out to be an autopsy photo of Ronald Green, and it shows him battered with a gash in his head and just with terrible injuries that, again, don't seem to be consistent with a car crash. And this just fuels his family trying to find out what happens.

And at this point fuels these growing calls from groups like the NAACP, from Ronald Green's family, for the state police, for the governor to release the body camera video to just show people what happened in this death. And they don't. governor to release the body camera video to just show people what happened in this death and they don't in October of 2020 we get audio body camera recorded audio it's not the video but to what one of the troopers was saying and I beat the ever-living out of him choked him and everything else trying to get him under control. And we finally got him in handcuffs when a third man got there and the son of a bitch was still fighting and we were still wrestling with him trying to hold him down because he was spitting blood everywhere.

Yeah. And then all of a sudden he just went limp. Damn. Yeah, I thought he was dead. We set him up real quick. He's on the ambulance so eventually after more than a year calling on the state police to release the video calling on the governor's office to intervene and release the video you know other organizations like the naacp and aclu in louisiana just building up pressure to try to get this out there. Eventually in October of 2020, the family is allowed to sort of see it in a private screening.

Once they had him on the ground, Officer Chris Hollingsworth put him in a chokehold, while at least one other officer, and I'm not sure which officer, tased him at that point a second time and a third time. It only raises more questions for them about what happened, why they were told what they were told initially about a car crash, and what's being done to investigate. While that was going on, the men continued to show obscenities and insults for about four minutes, sustained minutes of beating and choking before they put him in handcuffs. Once they placed him in handcuffs, the beating continued.

So it's months still, and the video is not made public in sort of the conventional way. It's made public when my colleague gets a hold of it and the Associated Press publishes it. And that's May of 2021. Let me see your fucking hands, motherfucker. Oh, God damn it, get up here. Get that fucking arm.

Motherfucker, you better not move. What the video ultimately shows is not a high-speed crash into a tree. It's Green out of the car, alert and responsive, and pleading with the troopers who are beating him, using a taser on him. And after he is shackled and lying on his belly, briefly dragging him along the rural Louisiana roadside. It's only after all of that that he ultimately dies. Jake, it feels like the body camera footage is really what breaks this investigation open. And it was released by the Associated Press, but your colleague before it was released by the Louisiana State Police Department.

How is this supposed to happen? Is this how footage is released to the public? The press leaks it first and then the police department says, okay, fine, here it is after two years? So I think this is an evolving issue. We've long seen police departments and prosecutors want to hold back evidence, including video evidence, in all sorts of cases. And it's something we hear regularly in police shootings or cases of police violence that we can't release the video because it's going to be evidence in an ongoing investigation. But we've also started to see some police departments take the position that showing the public what happened here,

whether it's good or bad, is important for maintaining the public trust. It's important for, you know, showing the public how we're doing our job and letting them evaluate the facts for themselves. That's not the position the Louisiana State Police Department has taken in this case or in any of the cases we've looked at. In the middle of all of this, we saw the head of the Louisiana State Police, the Colonel Kevin Reeves, he stepped down pretty abruptly.

And there's a new Colonel, Lamar Davis, who has not taken the position of releasing any of these videos, but he has come out and said publicly that he understands there are issues within his agency that need to be addressed. And he said that he wants the opportunity to address them. He's been on the job less than a year. But I don't think it's clear up to this point how the agency is going to handle body camera video in future cases. And has anyone been charged at this point in the death of Ronald Green? No. We're going to talk about how police can do body cameras better in a minute on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Thank you. James' unprecedented control and insight into company spend.

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Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Seth Stoughton, law professor at the University of South Carolina. When do cops start wearing body cameras in the United States? The history of video recording in policing is kind of fascinating. We're all familiar with dash cams or in-car cams that really came out in the mid to late 80s, but weren't popularized until the mid to late 90s.

So we've been trying to get police recording for a while. It's really only in the last, call it 30 years, where it's become ubiquitous. Dash cameras didn't really catch on for about a decade until they began to be seen as tools to support DUI prosecutions. I wasn't driving! I was a passenger! 40-year-old John Kellum from Sheboygan is arrested for his sixth OWI and has a tantrum in the back seat. When Mothers Against Drunk Driving

started to fund grants to allow agencies to get dash camera footage, it really gave rise to this recognition that having video of someone who might have been falling down drunk at the scene, but was, of course, dressed professionally and composed in court, could be really useful as essentially an investigative and prosecutive tool.

A little bit later, by the late 90s, the Drug Enforcement Administration was funding in-car camera grants to establish that motorists were giving their consent to officers allowing them to search their cars. Judges were starting to doubt officers when they say that a motorist consented to a search of their car. The judge would say, well, why would this guy have consented? He had two bricks of cocaine in the trunk. He never would have let you search the trunk. And the DEA funded these dash camera systems. And again, we see them as investigative and prosecutive tools where officers could use the evidence on video to say, no, this person actually did validly consent. The first mobile cameras were

introduced in 2006 by then Taser, now Ax, in the form of the Taser Cam. Tom, here's a camera you probably don't want to smile for. Taser guns with cameras that record just before, during, and after a shocking takedown. The Sheriff's Department says the new weapons will prove or disprove Taser complaints. What we now think of as body cameras followed not too long after that. And although the market today is certainly dominated by Axon, which used to be Taser International, there were a number of initial manufacturers.

And I imagine the handheld cameras lead us to the body cameras we're familiar with now, which are attached right to a police officer and are kind of tied to this broader idea of police accountability. How does that shift happen? The rhetoric of body cams is really when we started to see a strong push towards using recording technology as accountability. Today, I think I have found a solution that will help law enforcement officers and our citizens go home safe. That solution, Mr. President, our body worn cameras to be worn by our law enforcement officers throughout this country. Now, interestingly, that accountability rhetoric was much more common in public debates or among elected officials than it was within police agencies themselves. But at some point, this becomes basically the norm, right?

Really, after 2014-2015, there was a rapid increase in how widely body cameras were adopted. That was the summer of Walter Scott here in South Carolina, of Tamir Rice, of a number of high-profile police shootings. In the aftermath of Ferguson one year ago, this question caught fire. Should every cop in America wear a body camera? Amplifying that debate, the deaths of Eric Gardner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, and now Samuel DuBose. I think it's fair to describe body cameras today as ubiquitous, if not universal, in policing. Now, the Department of Justice just announced it's launching a $20

million program to buy body cameras for police officers. The Attorney General Loretta Lynch calls it a vital part of giving law enforcement what they need to tackle the 21st century challenges they face. And broadly speaking, does the sort of universality of body cameras on police officers lead to greater accountability? At the margins, yes, but it depends. At some agencies and with some incidents, body cameras have been critical to officer accountability. At other agencies or for other incidents, body cameras have not had any positive impact, have not had any impact. In some cases, may even have a negative impact on officer accountability. How's that? When we think about body cameras, we need to

remember that they are a tool. And just having a tool is not as important as using a tool appropriately. If you imagine someone who has carpentry tools, say the nicest hammer and the best table saw in the world, but has no idea how to use them, they aren't going to be doing very good carpentry projects. The same thing is true of body cameras. If an agency isn't using them appropriately, if they don't have the right policies and procedures in place, then they aren't going to be very useful as accountability tools. Is this how you end up in a situation like the one we saw with Ronald Green,

where he dies in police custody, the Louisiana State Police Department says it was a car accident. That's the story until the family presses and presses and presses and presses. And then something like two years later, the public gets to see a video. Yeah, I would not call that a body camera failure because it was not the technology itself that failed. And it was not our human limitations in interpreting video footage that failed. It was the rest of the agency that failed. An agency that has body cameras but doesn't require officers to turn them on or doesn't

check to see whether officers are recording the incidents that they're supposed to be recording or doesn't audit body cameras to ensure that officers are not only turning the cameras on but are conducting themselves appropriately is not making effective use of body camera video as a potential tool for accountability. This isn't just accountability. I think one of the mistakes that many agencies made is buying into the hype that body cameras could be all things for all people, that body cameras could be either a panacea or a very significant part of improving police community relations, increasing public trust and police legitimacy, solving accountability issues. Body cameras can help in some marginal ways with all of that,

but they can only help in a system that is designed to use them appropriately. It feels like there's this potential for body cameras to sort of revolutionize policing if they're used correctly. That's what I'm getting from you. Are there examples of police departments that are using body cameras in an optimal way? Absolutely, there are agencies that are doing it well. There are agencies like the LAPD that have broad mandatory recording policies and that also encourage or require supervisors to check to ensure that officers are recording the incidents that they are required to record. There are agencies that have made reviewing body-worn camera video part of an officer's annual evaluation process. That is, before a supervisor can

turn in an annual evaluation for a subordinate officer, they need to review a percentage of or a set number of the officer's videos to check for specific things that they may not otherwise see to identify whether the officer is polite during traffic stops or something like that. There are agencies that I think have done a very good job about making body-worn camera video accessible. That is, releasing it to the public either on a discretionary basis, like when there's a critical incident, the agency puts that video out there promptly, or ensure that the video is available upon request in situations where it's required. Here in South Carolina, for example, we have a state law that says that anyone who's on the video or anyone who's using the video in litigation has a right to that video.

Agencies, despite that clear legal statement, agencies can throw up a series of roadblocks to slow that down or make that more difficult, or they can be very proactive and transparent in providing that video. So yes, there are definitely agencies that are doing it well. Washington Metro Police Department, LAPD is generally doing it well, but there are also a number of agencies that are not doing it very well. Seth Stoughton is an associate professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and an associate professor affiliate

in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. We used some audio from ABC News today. Thanks, ABC News. Our episode was produced by Hadi Mouagdi. I'm Sean Ramos-Ferrum. It's Today Explained. Thank you.